During installation of new road pavement layers, the processing temperature of asphalt is an essential process parameter and has a significant influence on the properties of use of the pavement layer, e.g., on the bond between layers as well as the lifespan of the newly installed road pavement. For this reason, measurement of the installation temperature becomes increasingly important.
In practice, at least one compacting vehicle follows the road finishing machine during the installation of road pavement in order to compact the road pavement installed by means of the paving screed of the road finishing machine. The asphalt temperature of the newly installed road pavement is an important process parameter for the first entry of the compacting vehicle into the freshly installed road pavement. Therefore, finding the right time for compacting, i.e., for entry of the compacting vehicle into the new road pavement, is essential.
On one hand, too early entry into too hot asphalt leads to structural faults such as compacting cracks; on the other hand, too late entry leads to the asphalt being already cooled down strongly so that there is less time for roller compacting. Ideally, exactly the right time and/or the right temperature for the start of roller compacting should be determined.
The EP 2 789 741 A1 discloses a road finishing machine with a thermographic module that is configured to determine at least temperature ranges of the newly installed pavement layer behind the paving screed. On this basis, in particular functions on the road finishing machine are regulated during installation of the pavement.
Furthermore, special compacting vehicles with a pyrometer device are used nowadays to measure the surface temperature of the asphalt. In this process, the compacting vehicle driver on the compacting vehicle is told by means of a temperature display device how hot the asphalt is under his compacting vehicle. The compacting vehicle driver uses this temperature information for the compacting process as a routine action. In this application, however, the compacting vehicle driver only recognizes a too early entry into the hot asphalt when it is already too late, i.e., after having entered too hot asphalt material.
An asphalting system in which a road finishing machine is data-linked to multiple compacting vehicles following such road finishing machine is disclosed in the DE 10 2008 058 481 A1. Based on a temperature data model that is in particular created by the road finishing machine, the following compacting vehicles can receive navigation signals in order to move over the newly created road pavement at predefined distances to each other as well as in particular to the preceding road finishing machine. To achieve this data networking of the vehicles integrated in the asphalting system, such vehicles are equipped respectively with senders and receivers in order to share temperature and/or position data among each other. However, this requires all vehicles that are integrated in the asphalting system to be equipped with costly sender-receiver units in order to enable the data exchange among each other.
In reality, however, paving trains are flexibly composed of finishing and compacting vehicles at the construction site, especially for reasons of cost, whereby machines from different manufacturers, in part rental machines, are used for the paving train. Therefore, a data link according the asphalting system of the DE 10 2008 058 481 A1 is difficult to implement in such a paving train.